Bonnie Campbell, a former Iowa state attorney general who is serving as adviser and spokesperson for Education Management’s (Nasdaq:EDMC) legal counsel, issued the following statement:

“EDMC believes that the case should be dismissed with prejudice because the government’s False Claims Act and common law claims are legally flawed and factually insufficient.

“The narrow legal issue in this case is whether the sole basis for EDMC’s compensation of admissions officers was enrollment numbers. Federal regulations issued in 2002 expressly permitted companies to consider enrollment numbers when determining admission officer salaries, as long as compensation was not based solely on enrollment numbers.As EDMC’s brief describes in detail, the Company’s compensation plan complied with the law by requiring the consideration of five quality factors along with enrollments to determine salaries, and the Company took a number of steps to ensure that the compensation plan was properly followed.

“As the Company’s brief in support of the Motion to Dismiss explains, the government attempts to distract from insurmountable deficiencies in its case with overblown criticism of lawful recruiting actions by EDMC that are irrelevant to this case. Federal law allowed EDMC to recruit students and to encourage its admissions officers to recruit.”

The justice department and four states — California, Illinois, Florida and Indiana — filed a whistleblower suit against Education Management on Aug. 8, 2011, seeking damages for the more than $11 billion in federal funds that Education Management and its students collected from the Department of Education since July 1, 2003. The suit accused the company and its network of 101 schools in 31 states of fraud for the way it certified compliance with federal law to generate billions of dollars in student aid. The original suit was filed four years ago by Lynntoya Washington, a former admissions recruiter for Education Management’s Art Institute of Pittsburgh Online Division, which was later joined by Michael Mahoney, a former training director for the company’s Online Higher Education Division.